


And we shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened

by acaramelmacchiato



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Winter Soldier fic, it's like the 1950s, prison tats, really - Freeform, the winter soldier had an ok time in Dalstroy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-23 21:18:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1579853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato/pseuds/acaramelmacchiato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier goes to Dalstroy and gets a prison tattoo. Sort of. The story behind the red star. Spoiler: it's car paint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And we shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened

It takes the Winter Soldier a full forty-five minutes to make it from cold storage to a useful condition, and they keep the time down by increasing the internal heat of the room. The technicians are sweating over him, taking his temperature and asking him questions to gauge everything from object permanence to depth perception to the last brand of integral suppressor he remembers.

When they finish they take him upstairs, and it's like he was here yesterday, in an office overlooking Staraya Square.  A bakelite-handled samovar and tea service is cooling next to a cheap desk, cluttered with stained paper. Cigarettes are piling on the sill. 

Today there is wetness fogging the windows. Today it is hot and with the rain abated, people are cheerfully queuing at the outdoor kiosks for soda and Zhigulevskoye. Last time had been cold, had been winter, or maybe that had been the intermediary step; it isn't worth pursuing. 

"I envy your commute," says the Presidium man behind the desk, Shvernik, looking for something in his filed outbox. "Wake up and right upstairs to work. I was stuck in an hour of traffic just to make it inside the city, this morning."

When he finds it, he passes the Winter Soldier a folio of information bound with a large rubber band. It is stained from the general condition of his office; sun-spotted and warped with spilled tea. “If you need further information we are happy to help you. You have the gratitude of the Presidium, ahh, and the party and the First Secretary, uhm, Tse-ka, and you have my own, well, good luck.”

 

* * *

  

The car that takes him back toward Kodinka is liveried by the Red Room, and the Red Room’s rules apply: He travels with an escort, no briefcases, no belt buckles, pockets turned out. They finish the exhausting process of entering the bench seat in the back, roll down the square, and almost immediately they get stuck behind a bus.

Then the car is crowded in by the route taxicabs that follow the bus.

When the car horns have quieted, the Red Room apparatchik shakes his head and taps the folio, giving the driver some privacy to collect himself. “Some caper this is, eh? You know, Kolyma is not technically habitable. Couldn't send the Summer Soldier, you know, anyone -- if you know what I mean.”

“Plus, it would cost more for the commission,” says the Winter Soldier, with mercenary and simple fairness.

The apparatchik looks uncomfortable. “Only one way to get to Dalstroy for free, you know, and that’s…”

The Winter Soldier has a brief flash of temper at this misuse of resources.

Their best agent, their trained spy, their operative and assassin, loyal and proven, again and again and again -- the Red Room is in many ways the stingiest, most bottom-feeding component of the entire country. To the point that they are often needlessly cheap, and it has caused him more than enough problems, but never have they been so disrespectful. There is shaving his legs to wear stockings with a dress and there is spending the night in a garbage collection truck and there is shooting a man in the back from a mile away and  _then there is_ saying he is a traitor and a criminal and has no stake in this country.

Outside the window he sees they are passing through Presnya; the sidewalks are busy with families on the way to the zoo.

“If you stop the car, I’ll get out so I can quickly commit a crime,” the Winter Soldier says.

“No,” the apparatchik takes him seriously, but begins to look more uncomfortable. “There’d be no time to get a trial, and no way to be sure you’d go to Norilsk. Really there is one option.”

The Winter Soldier doesn't argue. He would die for this country on instinct; he will go to a Dalstroy camp armed not even with bootlaces, to kill an aging delegate of the seventeenth congress; he will go where he is told, come back if he is told.

He is not equipped to argue.

 

* * *

  

When he arrives in the main station of the camp he is almost immediately exsanguinated by mosquitoes, and it's downhill from there.

The station is guarded by barbed wire and towers built low in deference to the permafrost -- the  _permafrost,_ and it is summer currently -- and the central dirt road is cluttered with sloppily-parked trucks and the rows of barracks. There are other buildings in more curious shapes, the buildings, the mine and then simply trees. 

The first day he spends in the mine, with an eye out for his target. But no, the man is not here, and that night when he is sent to the poorly-ventilated barracks the man is not there, either. It had been easier for him to replace an existing criminal than to devote resources to the fabrication of a new criminal, and so there is one man unaccounted for somewhere just outside Dudinka, but no one had been able to locate someone with the proper training, and so his housing is inconvenient; his operation will take at least a day longer. 

It's a write-off. 

His cellmates fall into very surprisingly domestic talk, as someone makes tea over a candle flame they wonder how much of it they have left. Someone has run dry of the makhorka for cigarettes and someone else can provide it, the cost is that he refresh a tattoo that has begun to fade and bleed out. The Winter Soldier ignores them.

“Done with ordinary soot,” says the inmate, sliding efficiently out of his shirt and indicating something or other in the tapestry of tattoos on his chest. “Wasn’t any good in the first place.”

“I’ll fix it tomorrow," says the man who wants cigarettes.

“And what about you,” says someone to the Winter Soldier, thinking he is the professional thief currently rotting on the road from Dudinka. "You've earned stars. Why not let Puchkov put them on? Only one time you’ll get such a generous offer.”

The Winter Soldier thinks it will be a cold day in hell before he lets them, but he shrugs noncommittally to avoid the argument. 

 

* * *

 

The next day he is taken from the mine and driven to the science building, a remote outpost nominally of the Experimental Design Bureau, in its own subdivision by the camp’s undeveloped center. But even the administrators and guards call it the sharashka.

Upon entering the science warehouse the first man he sees is his target, Grigory Buchkin, an old man with a pitiable mustache vastly outshone by his eyebrows, glasses, and an impatience to welcome his new assistant.

“You are what I was promised?” he asks. “They told me you are a chemical engineer.”

“I studied to be a chemical engineer,” the Winter Soldier corrects him, on behalf of the man he murdered earlier in the week. 

“I don’t distinguish between accomplishment and potential,” says Buchkin, apparently satisfied.

The Winter Soldier shrugs, having no opinion of Buchkin himself except that he is a Bolshevik and a party traitor whom the Presidium could not leave alive even in exile. He takes a look around the warehouse. The activity is discreet and highly mysterious, and even the guards flanking him are interested in it.

“Thank you,” says Buchkin to them. “The still’s in the front if you need.”

Then when they are out the door Buchkin looks around the room to be sure they are alone. He takes the Winter Soldier by the shoulders, then rolls up his left sleeve to examine the articulated metal of his arm. He moves it a couple of times to test the joints of the wrist and elbow.

“So you are the Winter Soldier,” Buchkin says.

The Winter Soldier takes it in stride. “You're making a mistake, my name is --“

"You should be a better spy than this, don’t go telling me fake names,” says Buchkin. “I like this,” he says, hands still on the arm. "But it doesn't belong to you." He flexes the fingers before the Winter Soldier jerks his hand back.

 

* * *

 

When he gets back to his usual subdivision Puchkov harasses him about the tattoo again, putting together the guitar string that operates his instrument. “I was a print illustrator before I came here, you know. Posters. Propaganda.”

“I don't need tetanus,” says the Winter Soldier. “Move along.”

“All the rest of us have them, and how else shall we know each other? I am beginning to wonder about you.”

The Winter Soldier stares him down. "What do you mean," he demands. 

“I mean that who a man is -- is very little more than what he does, where he is from, whom and what he loves. And here we wear that on our skin.”

The Winter Soldier is beginning to read suspicion in the man's tone, so he looks squeamish and asks what the ink is made of. 

 

* * *

 

After two weeks there are no arguments remaining. The process on his right shoulder is, after the mosquitoes, barely problematic. Puchkov finishes up on one shoulder and scoots him around to start in on the next one.

“That’s metal,” says the Winter Soldier.

“And this is car paint.”

They think this says where he is from, whom and what he loves, but his left arm is a feat of engineering and his right is simply weaker. 

 

* * *

 

The next day he catches Buchkin alone in one of the lab rooms and holds his face over a Bunsen burner. 

“I don’t envy you cleaning this up,” Buchkin says, and the Winter Soldier tightens his grip on the man’s neck. 

“Don't concern yourself.”

“Hold me with your left arm, soldier, for symmetry,” says the old man with a surprisingly nimble twist out of the Winter Soldier’s hand.

The Winter Soldier obliges, slamming Buchkin back into a folding lab table, and the contents clatter off. With the Bunsen burner sputtering on the floor it becomes expedient to simply tighten the metal fingers around Buchkin’s throat and wait.

“Hail Hydra,” says Buchkin, and chokes on it. 

He leaves the body on the floor, without cleaning anything up, and before he leaves the lab he fires a flare for pickup.

 

* * *

 

When he gets back to Moscow they burn off the right tattoo with standard magnesium powder. It smells terrible. 

The Red Room offices are contained in the center of their compound in the Khoroshyovsky District, and their conference space ranges from storage closets to this, a large room with vinyl chair cushions and a thin window that looks over a warm night in Moscow. The apparatchiks are served unintentionally cool coffee in teacups, while they inspect the Winter Soldier's left arm for more cosmetic damage. 

“There’s nothing we can do to that equipment to corrode it without damaging it,” says a technician, tapping the Winter Soldier on his left shoulder with the handle of his wrench. 

“Maybe he should have thought of that before he defaced our technology," someone grumbles. "What’s that painted with?”

“Car paint,” says the technician. "Cheap enough."

So they fix it cheaply. And the brand on his arm ends up a very neat stamp of a five-pointed red star, like the mark on a military plane, the five fingers of a worker's hand.

The minute the paint dries they put him back under. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A coda, which has no place in the story but w/e:
> 
> “So, wait,” Steve says, coming around the kitchen island with whiskey in mismatched glasses and an aging bag of roasted almonds. “You spent all this Winter Soldier time just being constantly harassed by people making really legitimate arguments about your identity, and you ignored all of them?”
> 
> “It was not constant,” says Bucky. “It was like five or six times.”
> 
> “And you never thought, gee, no one else gets told they’re a repurposed American soldier this often, that’s something to look into?”
> 
> Bucky takes the larger glass and stares at Steve resentfully. “You signed a self-referential NDA for SHIELD, right?”
> 
> “This question is obviously a trap,” says Steve, narrowing his eyes. “So I am not answering it.”
> 
> “It was like that.”
> 
> “Self-referential brainwashing?”
> 
> “If you’d shown me a picture of myself I wouldn’t recognize it. The point is, that is the story of how I got a gigantic red star stamped on the arm by the guy who puts the serial numbers on submarines, and also the story of the only time I was in prison. Two stories. Price of one.”
> 
> Steve shrugs, flops down on the couch and starts scrolling through Netflix. He pauses threateningly on The Hunt for Red October.


End file.
